Help a bad mage with Heroic Tortos 25m :(

So a little bird told me that this is sort of a nightmare fight for most mages, that being said I feel like my dps could use a lot of help.

I spend almost all of my time avoiding turtles which doesn't seem to give me a lot of time to stand and cast at them as much as I like. I'm also trying to line up my combustion with all the turtle callings to try and squeeze out more damage since eventually we start getting overrun by the amount of turtles coming out and not dying fast enough. I've tried swapping to nether tempest but it doesn't seem to give much of a boost. When the fight starts and I get a good combust spread to the turtles I can rock a good 300-400k dps but as the fight goes on, I drop down to about 150-200k dps which feels quite a bit low considering most of the raid is well over 220k.

This isn't my ideal dps fight because I kick for our group. Try to have a slow under tortos' neck or use flamestrike then spread combustions to the turtles when you can. I sometimes spec frost bomb and use that on turtles/bats whichever is more clumped(or if you use living bomb/nether tempest just keep it up on all 3 turtles). Using nether tempest/living bomb, inferno blast, instant pyros, and scorch for your movement will really help your dps out instead of not casting.

Honestly the make or break when we were progressing was having enough dps helping for turtles, quicker they die the quicker bats die because of the shell debuff and the more up time on boss you can tunnel for without being knocked up or having to run. We had some bad weeks with only 1-2 ranged dps in raid and had 1-2 melee chase them(slows makes it fine depending on the melee class). If you're having issues with moving and need a little more space for error you could always spec Incanter's Ward and just never use it. I believe on fight the dps difference is small enough that if you save being knocked/move and have to recast it more than makes up for it.

Our logs for this week. If you notice most of your damage will be combustion off boss to turtles, then just lining yourself up to dodge them and keep your bombs up all the time. I do use ice barrier every stomp to keep my shield up, saves some effort of having to grab another and saves our healers a little bit of work.

Swap those crit/stam gems to crit/hit, even if you go over hit cap with it you still get more room so you might be able to reforge another item away from hit and be less over hit cap than before. I personally like reforgelite, it's just simple and fast. If you can get the breath of the hydra off meg or have one in your bags use that over wushoo's.

So a little bird told me that this is sort of a nightmare fight for most mages, that being said I feel like my dps could use a lot of help.

I spend almost all of my time avoiding turtles which doesn't seem to give me a lot of time to stand and cast at them as much as I like. I'm also trying to line up my combustion with all the turtle callings to try and squeeze out more damage since eventually we start getting overrun by the amount of turtles coming out and not dying fast enough. I've tried swapping to nether tempest but it doesn't seem to give much of a boost. When the fight starts and I get a good combust spread to the turtles I can rock a good 300-400k dps but as the fight goes on, I drop down to about 150-200k dps which feels quite a bit low considering most of the raid is well over 220k.

Use Nether Tempest and dot all 3 turtles and Tortos. I'm sure you know but first turtle is the most important to die then from there they should be able to just be dot'ed down with a little single target. Doting bats is useless unless you are just trying to juice and never use frost bomb. You are in a 25 man so I'm sure you have Lock, DKs, hunters and rogues all of which have better slows and with using frost bomb you run the risk of splashing the bats and overwriting the slow since FB is a 70% but it only lasts for 2 seconds therefore screwing the kiter. Fact of it is that if you are doing the fight correctly (not juicing off bats) then you will be low on the dps meters as a Mage, pretty much only thing you can do is win the damage to Tortos or Whirl Turtle game. But being fire you have zero mobility issues, scorch is an amazing filler. Also make so you are taking Ice Barrier and piping it right before stomp, if done correctly you will never have to reapply it.

Yar, I never have any time to even touch the bats since the turtles have been dying pretty slow the second we kill one set the next is already coming out. I'll change my glyph/gems and hit up reforgelite too. Thanks

As a quick update we got him down last night! (yay!) I am working on making the change to arcane since I've never really been amazing at fire and according to some of the sims I've seen arcane looks like its pulling ahead of fire as far as spec score. Althought both specs still score very high, I've always sorta preferred the pink lazers :P

So a little bird told me that this is sort of a nightmare fight for most mages, that being said I feel like my dps could use a lot of help.

I spend almost all of my time avoiding turtles which doesn't seem to give me a lot of time to stand and cast at them as much as I like. I'm also trying to line up my combustion with all the turtle callings to try and squeeze out more damage since eventually we start getting overrun by the amount of turtles coming out and not dying fast enough. I've tried swapping to nether tempest but it doesn't seem to give much of a boost. When the fight starts and I get a good combust spread to the turtles I can rock a good 300-400k dps but as the fight goes on, I drop down to about 150-200k dps which feels quite a bit low considering most of the raid is well over 220k.

Yes I know I'm over hit cap, I've tried forging out as much as I could and started using stam/crit gems instead of hit/crit (ugh)

Please be gentle with me, I know I'm a terrible mage but I'm the only one our guild has currently haha.

You have NOT tried reforging all your hit away considering your neck has hit and isn't reforging away from it. Download reforge lite to help you with reforging. It also sounds like you guys need more slows on the turtles. Your dps, if you're on turtle most of the time, is going to be lower than everyone else's. Especially if they're killing bats. The turtle kick debuff assures this.

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Originally Posted by Greensexy

As a quick update we got him down last night! (yay!) I am working on making the change to arcane since I've never really been amazing at fire and according to some of the sims I've seen arcane looks like its pulling ahead of fire as far as spec score. Althought both specs still score very high, I've always sorta preferred the pink lazers :P

Arcane only performs better than fire when you can stand still... Considering you have problems with positioning I'm not sure you shouldn't go frost instead of arcane.

Arcane on Tortos? Oh my god~ It sucks, really. So much movement for what? Sweet 400k dps peeks on turtles? Fire is far too good on tortos, just spamming scorch and pyros. I'm a little bit lazy but it could be a dps increase to spec Incanter's Ward (USE IT! Not only the passive~)

personally ive had a ton of luck using incanter's ward + temp sheld. /cast temp shield /cast incanter's ward, use right before quake stomp goes out, this usually aligns with call of torots. My dps was terrible using invocation, you simply cant afford to spend the time trying to get of an evocate, if you have to move before it finishes, and re-cast its such a huge dps loss. The passive 6% dmg buff is fine. Also when stomp comes out it will kill both your absorbs but the heal from temp shield will either keep you crystal shell from falling off or will get your health back up enough to grab the shell immediately really helps out your healers

Cone of Cold can work wonders, both as they exit the initial slows like DnD or hunter traps, and I like it for the quick slow when one is getting close. They literally slow down to the point you can dance around them. I also glyph frostfire bolt to help with slows on my target.

Once you get consistent dps on the turtles, you have plenty of time to evocate. I'm not sure if the evocation glyph's healing helps the shield or not. Of course, we either have melee only on the bats plus one ranged or we kite and we have melee always on the boss and ranged on the turtles. We also 2 heal, 2 tank, 4 range, 2 melee. I dunno how much different it is for 25 man.

I find that if I make an effort to move further when more than 1 rockfall circle is near me, I can help the healers out with the shield, so incidental damage from the ocassional turtle spin doesn't hurt me as much.